The upper school students are in exam crunch time, so I thought I’d give them a break and write a post myself. We are just a few weeks away from the trip, and if it weren’t for exams, the students would probably be giddy with excitement by now. The hard work of the exams keeps their emotions in check, but several of them have count down timers on their desktops to remind them of how many days left until the trip. It’s been a great year. The students are very responsible, interested, and enthusiastic, and our lesson set this year looks like it will be one of our best. We got the request from our Kenyan friend that we should develop lessons about careers. He told us that his students often would say things like “I want to be a lawyer” not knowing at all what a lawyer does or how one prepares for that career. I had students research a variety of careers, develop categories of careers – such as, “Working in Nature” – and then letting the student choose a category that appealed to them. The categories the students came up with include: Music and Art, Sports, Food, Transportation, Working in Nature, Computers, Media, Education, Engineering, Building, Healthcare, Civil Service, Law, Math, Science, and Meteorology. (There was one additional category – Managing Money – that no one wanted to take on. I found that interesting, but we may tackle this one together when we are in St. John.) It was challenging to come up with information that was universally informative and not America-centric. We also focused on making the language at about a 6th grade level, since many people using the lessons would not be native English speakers. To that end, we worked with CSG’s 6th graders to get a feel for what language is appropriate, how much reading we could expect, and how to make the lessons more engaging. We had to make sure that we made the lesson as broadly useful as possible, eliminating words like “high school education” since not everyone in the world calls what we do “high school.” Finally, we had long discussions about whether to include information about pay. We ultimately decide not to, since not only would people have to convert from dollars to their local currency, but we have no idea whether culturally the same relative pay scale exists worldwide. There were MANY lessons for our students! Our plan is to show the lessons to our middle school students in St. John and use their feedback to polish the lessons during our free time in St. John. All in all, it was a very worthwhile experience. One that will hopefully yield great lessons that are used worldwide! I do tend to write a lot of detail, so I’ll stop there. Please follow our trip blog as we switch over to our other page! And don’t forget to comment! It’s always nice to have some feedback! Christine

Last week I taught the 4th graders for the first time, and it was quite the eye opening experience. I came to class not as prepared as I should have been making it a little difficult. Nevertheless, the experience overall was a positive one and gave a sneak peak about what teaching in Saint John will be like. Some of the kids liked to explore while others simply just followed what we would say while teaching them. It was neat when the kids got the hang of it, in fact many of them understood it more than I did! (I will make sure that changes by Saint John!) Teaching the kids though really did make me excited to go to Saint John and teach the kids what we have been practicing all year.

On another note, for the past couple of weeks we have been working on lessons. Mine happens to be on law. I have really enjoyed the freedom we have gotten with these lessons. It is nice how we get to each use our own creative techniques to create a unique lesson. I have particularly enjoyed tracing and drawling pictures for the different slides! I am excited to add some games to my lesson and see what it looks like when it is complete. I can not believe that Saint John is less than a month away, I am very excited!

The past couple of weeks we have been working individually on our education project/games to show to the kids once we get to St. John. My project is on transportation and the goal is to teach them about possible future job opportunities in the transportation word, for example, a polite, truck driver, taxi driver, ect. The projects are educational but also very fun and interactive. They include drawings and animations that will make it easy and fun for the kids to learn about the topic. My favorite thing so far is being able to have so much creative freedom to kind of do whatever you want. From drawling your own character to deciding what kind of game you want to create. To be able to come up with an idea and see it come to life on your computer screen is really cool. It’s also cool that we will be able to share these and they will be useful when we get to St. John. It makes me feel good that there is a purpose to what we are doing and that in the end are going to educate and helps kids.

Over the past few weeks in class we have been working on our lessons on careers that kids can pursue. I have also been using class time to help take apart computers and replace broken parts. This will be very helpful when we go to St. John because we will be able to reuse these computers that had been rendered useless. I love the task of fixing the computers because it is a break from researching and when the computer turns back on after replacing parts I feel so accomplished. It is also awesome because when you take the computers to St John and know that someone who wouldn’t have a computer now has one you fixed, it’s a great feeling. That is probably my favorite part of One Laptop Per Child and the feeling that sticks with me every time I think about the class. Working on lessons is of course helpful, but we do not see the kid’s reactions to the lessons because they are so far away. The satisfaction of their expressions is one that will stick with me.